Computational Methods For Physics

This text book on computational methods for physics is mainly intended for the undergraduates with physics major under newly introduced choice based credit system (CBCS). It covers numerical techniques for solving algebraic or transcendental equa-tions, differentiation, integration, interpolation, and system of linear equations. As from elementary to advanced levels differential equations play an important role in theoretical physics, special attention is provided for them in this book. The content includes techniques for solving ordinary differential equations with solved example of physical problems. Besides the theoretical discourse at least one example of physical problems for each numerical methods is provided in this book. Analytical solutions for some of the examples are also presented along with the numerical solutions so that students can check the applicability of the given numerical techniques. The last two chapters are devoted to partial differential equations and ordinary nonlinear differential equations. These two chapters are introduced for a little advanced level. Through the latter one, students can venture into the fascinating world of nonlinearity leading to chaotic behaviour of a physical system. Though plenty of software such as Mathematica, MATLAB etc. are available to compute numerical solutions of different problems in physical sciences, the main goal of this book is to make a solid foundation of the students towards computing. What I hope is that FORTRAN would be a better choice as a programming language, preferably in a Linux platform. Linux platform is suggested as it is freely available and equipped with compilers. One graphics software is also essential for visualization of the computed results. I have mostly used gnuplot for plotting outputs of the given programs. I hope this book will be helpful for the students studying computational physics.